Privacy Policy

Effective 2026-08-24. Applies to the Pencil In iOS app and getpencilin.com, operated by Charles Klein LLC ("we").

The short version

Pencil In needs three things to work: a way to know it's you, a read-only feed of your bank transactions, and the commitments you type in. We store as little of that as possible, encrypt what must sit on a server, never sell or share it for advertising, and delete all of it when you ask.

What we collect

Account

You sign in with Sign in with Apple, handled by Clerk. We receive an Apple user identifier and, if you choose to share it, your email address (or Apple's relay address). We do not receive your Apple password.

Bank data

You connect accounts through Plaid. Plaid gives us a read-only access token per institution plus account names, balances, and transactions (date, amount, merchant, pending state). We never see or store your bank credentials. Access tokens are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM under a key held in a hardware key-management service; nobody at Charles Klein LLC can read a token in the clear.

Your ledger

The commitments you pencil in, their dates and amounts, and how they matched against transactions. This is the app's core data. It lives on your device and syncs through your own iCloud account. Our server never stores your commitments; it holds only the encrypted bank tokens and the transaction feed needed to match them. We do not run analytics, ad SDKs, or crash-reporting that phones home.

Website

getpencilin.com is static. It sets no cookies and runs no trackers. Our host (Cloudflare) keeps standard, short-lived request logs.

What we do with it

Only what the product does: fetch your transactions, match them against your commitments, and show you the number. We do not sell personal data, share it with advertisers, or use it to train models. We share data only with the processors named here (Apple, Clerk, Plaid, Neon for the database, Railway for hosting, Amazon Web Services for key management, Cloudflare for the site), each under their own terms.

Retention and deletion

Data is kept while your account is active. You can disconnect any bank from inside the app; that revokes the Plaid connection and deletes its transactions from our server. You can delete your account from inside the app; that revokes every bank connection, deletes every server-side record, deletes your Clerk identity, and revokes the Sign in with Apple grant, all in one step. Backups age out within 30 days. If you cannot reach the app, email [email protected] and we will do it by hand within 7 days.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, a correction, or deletion at any time at [email protected]. We honor these for everyone regardless of where you live.

Children

Pencil In is not for anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect data from minors.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the effective date above and note it in the app.